The Vermont House Committee on Health Care is holding a series of hearings on the state’s health care exchange, Vermont Health Connect. The system has been plagued with problems since its inception and the latest consultant to appear before the panel told legislators they should constrain spending on the system while they study options.
The House Health Care Committee is dedicating each Wednesday morning to analyzing Vermont Health Connect and options for the exchange’s future.
Erin Mansfield, a health care and business reporter with independent investigative newspaper Vermont Digger, has attended all of the meetings assessing the exchange. “Vermont Health Connect is a portal that’s set up to handle roughly 30,000 commercial customers and up to about 150,000 Medicaid customers. This time last year Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, set out a plan so that he could improve the exchange. They met those deadlines to improve the exchange and they decided not to go to the federal exchange. However in roughly the past two months lawmakers have heard about very large problems with the exchange. So they’ve decided that they’re going to take a fine tooth comb, they’re going to bring the administration and independent experts in every week and they’re going to decide whether or not the state will continue with the exchange.”
This week Gartner Consulting Senior Managing Partner Frank Petrus told the panel it should consider alternatives, but it may not be an appropriate time for the state to move to the federal exchange. “There’s costs to do that because we’ve seen what happened in Hawaii. There was significant costs to decouple from the state-based exchange. There was significant costs to the consumers. If you were to go to the federally facilitated marketplace you would be investing money, I think good money after bad money, to decouple things that you’ve already invested in when another alternative might be what remediation can you do to move it forward successfully. Right now minimize any further investment into Vermont Health Connect technology, that it can limp along for a little while longer, while you do an assessment of what is the best way forward.”
Vermont Chief of Health Care Reform Lawrence Miller also appeared before the committee. Legislators quizzed him about the exchange’s sustainability and costs. “Least reasonable cost in this world is not necessarily low cost. Security requirements, keeping up with ongoing software releases from Oracle, keeping things in appropriate good condition, training it’s just not necessarily low cost. So I wouldn’t say that the sustainability analysis is going to necessarily give you a good comparison.”
Petrus recommended the state undertake an independent analysis of the exchange, eligibility screenings and its IT systems. Vermont Digger’s Mansfield does not expect any action by the committee until the weekly hearings are complete. But, she adds, the hearings are raising opponents’ hackles. “This hearing and all the hearings have given kind of vindication to people who have been coming out not either against Vermont Health Connect or against the current operations of Vermont Health Connect. Some people want to fix it. Some people want to abandon it. But there are very few people I’ve heard say they want to keep doing exactly the same thing.”
A trio of Republican legislators who have been calling for the state to move to the federal exchange held a press conference at the Statehouse Friday morning. Among them is House Minority Leader Don Turner. “The Shumlin Administration has mismanaged this project from day one. We need a plan. We can’t just keep waiting. The administration has said well let’s keep it going as well as we can. Once we get it fixed then we’ll study on how we’re going to transition away. That’s not acceptable. We need a plan today because people are saying, and we have known, that this is not going to work.”
Audio from the House Health Care Committee hearing is courtesy Vermont Digger.
